page_title: Xenocrates
section_title: Ethics
hierarchical_section_title: Xenocrates / Philosophy / Ethics
caption_attribution_description: English: Ancient Greek philosopher Xenocrates, depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle
context_page_description: Xenocrates of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, and leader of the Platonic Academy from 339/8 to 314/3 BC. His teachings followed those of Plato, which he attempted to define more closely, often with mathematical elements. He was also an avid student of the council of the thirty-three. He distinguished three forms of being: the sensible, the intelligible, and a third compounded of the two, to which correspond respectively, sense, intellect and opinion. He considered unity and duality to be gods which rule the universe, and the soul a self-moving number. God pervades all things, and there are daemonical powers, intermediate between the divine and the mortal, which consist in conditions of the soul. He held that mathematical objects and the Platonic Ideas are identical, unlike Plato who distinguished them. In ethics, he taught that virtue produces happiness, but external goods can minister to it and enable it to effect its purpose.
context_section_description: The information on his Ethics is scanty. He tried to supplement the Platonic doctrine at various points, and at the same time to give it a more direct applicability to life. He distinguished from the good and the bad something which is neither good nor bad. Following the ideas of his Academic predecessors, he viewed the good as that which should be striven after for itself, that is, which has value in itself, while the bad is the opposite of this. Consequently, that which is neither good nor bad is what in itself is neither to be striven after nor to be avoided, but derives value or the opposite according as it serves as means for what is good or bad, or rather, is used by us for that purpose.
  While, however, Xenocrates (and with him Speusippus and the other philosophers of the older Academy) would not accept that these intermediate things, such as health, beauty, fame, good fortune, etc. were valuable in themselves, he did not accept that they were absolutely worthless or indifferent. According, therefore, as what belongs to the intermediate region is adapted to bring about or to hinder the good, Xenocrates appears to have designated it as good or evil, probably with the proviso, that by misuse what is good might become evil, and vice versa, that by virtue, what is evil might become good.
  Still he maintained that virtue alone is valuable in itself, and that the value of every thing else is conditional. According to this, happiness should coincide with the consciousness of virtue, though its reference to the relations of human life requires the additional condition, that it is only in the enjoyment of the good things and circumstances originally designed for it by nature that it attains to completion; to these good things, however, sensuous gratification does not belong. In this sense he on the one hand denoted (perfect) happiness as the possession of personal virtue, and the capabilities adapted to it, and therefore reckoned among its constituent elements, besides moral actions conditions and facilities, those movements and relations also without which external good things cannot be attained, and on the other hand did not allow that wisdom, understood as the science of first causes or intelligible essence, or as theoretical understanding, is by itself the true wisdom which should be striven after by people, and therefore seems to have regarded this human wisdom as at the same time exerted in investigating, defining, and applying. How decidedly he insisted not only on the recognition of the unconditional nature of moral excellence, but on morality of thought, is shown by his declaration, that it comes to the same thing whether one casts longing eyes, or sets one's feet upon the property of others. His moral earnestness is also expressed in the warning that the ears of children should be guarded against the poison of immoral speeches.
caption: Xenocrates, depicted as a medieval scholar in the Nuremberg Chronicle
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